


The Crane Conundrum

by trash_rendar



Category: Batman - All Media Types
Genre: Canon Potpourri, Gen, Investigations, Past Abuse, Past Child Abuse, Road Trips, Writing Riddles Is Hard, feat. Edward Nygma's total lack of boundaries
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-01
Updated: 2020-05-28
Packaged: 2021-02-28 06:48:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 6,416
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22965664
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/trash_rendar/pseuds/trash_rendar
Summary: ’What can scar a scarecrow?’The Riddler intends to find out.
Comments: 5
Kudos: 41





	1. one leg in the morning

“What drives authors to keep working, windows to be closed, and young American men to Canada?”

The Scarecrow look up and glowers owlishly through the eyeholes torn in his burlap mask. There are papers scattered around his crossed legs, arranged in a half-circle around his knees; chemical equations and diagrams cover the pages, typed out in crisp toner ink and vandalized in scribbled pen and pencil, barely visible under the jaundiced light cast by an elderly bare bulb hanging on a wire from the ceiling. As current, this meager collection sitting on the basement floor of Edward Nygma’s hidden safehouse in Crime Alley represents the sum total of Doctor Crane’s ‘fear factory’ – intellectual assets that had slipped through the GCPD’s evidence collection net before being generously returned to their rightful owner upon his escape from Arkham Asylum.

This new dynamic of their relationship as arch-criminals – that being tenant and landlord – was uncomfortable to the Scarecrow, the Riddler knew. Living under someone’s roof - in their debt, at their whim – could be, at best, uneasy. Between fellow rogues, it could quickly become grating. But Crane was no doubt already planning his extrication, and the Riddler had made a show of refusing rent (though he would expect a generous kickback later, as reward for snatching the secret of fear toxin from the cops’ clutches), so in all it wasn’t as bad as it could have been.

That being said, of course, it was still grating. If only in a one-sided, needling sort of way – the kind of way that could only come from the Riddler.

Edward knew this, of course, and cultivated the needling proudly. After all, what kind of host would he be if he didn’t make sure his guest was properly exercising his brain?

“Well? Any guesses?”

“None whatsoever.”

“Come now, doctor, this is an easy one. A toss-up!”

Crane rolls his eyes, hunching back over his papers. “Believe it or not, Edward, I have more important things to do than play your games.”

“Not from where I’m sitting.” From where the Riddler is sitting – which happens to be on top of the washer and dryer – he reaches out and gives the cord of the lightbulb a tug with the crook of his cane, setting the light dancing everywhere around the room except the spot where Crane’s files are arranged. “Could it be, perhaps, that you just don’t know the answer?”

“Will you finally stop bothering me if I say so?”

“Possibly, possibly. But I’ll be very disappointed in you.”

“Then fine. I don’t know, and I give up. Please, enlighten me.”

“The correct answer is, of course, a _draft_. Much like the one _you_ must be feeling right now, dear doctor.”

“Is it not enough that you torment me on a daily basis, Edward? Must you really lower yourself to mocking my _costume_ as well?”

“Such as it is,” Nygma replies indiffidently as he dismounts the washing machine. “Really, Crane, I understand sackcloth and twine are scarce in Arkham, but you really _should_ cover up. I mean, how _shameless_!”

It’s not the intent of the design, he knows – the costume of the Scarecrow is always to some degree limited by whatever materials are available, accounting for Crane’s own habitual poverty and the tight accommodations of the asylum. But he will admit the good doctor has done well with what little he had on hand – the hooded mask and the stitched-together arms and sleeves, indeed, evoke the figure of an eerie, shredded manikin and a certain deranged, nightmarish creativity.

It’s no thousand-dollar, gold-embroidered three-piece emerald suit. But clothes don’t always make the man.

Scarecrow hums to himself. “A sorry state of affairs indeed, if _Edward Nygma_ is accusing me of exhibitionism.”

“Only offering my opinion as an expert.”

The bulb still capers wildly on its string. Riddler catches it with a gloved hand, allowing the light to finally fall still. He glances down at Scarecrow, a miniature sun burning ambiently in his palm, a smug smirk plastered on his face. Frosty brown eyes peer up at him for a moment, squinting wryly, before Crane huddles back over his formulas.

Bare skin grows taut as the doctor leans forward; Crane is so lean and so pale that Nygma can make out all the sinews and tendons that lie just under the surface of his flesh – and more than a few blood veins, too, without even trying too hard. A certain striation of scar tissue, almost healed, glints at him under the aged fluorescent yellow light; compulsively, Edward’s eyes follow it as it leads him, like the clew of Theseus, across the doctor’s shoulder blades. Presently a pattern emerges, a pattern that is not a pattern – more a scattershot of random incisions, scattered like straw over his shoulder blades, written into the skin – something ugly and ancient. Something, he suspects, wasn’t meant to be seen.

Edward spends a long moment tracing the warp and weft of the wound – much longer than he means.

“Don’t stare,” Crane says curtly. “It’s unbecoming.”

“I wasn’t _staring_.”

“I believe the clinical term is ‘ogling’. But sure, Edward, _I’m_ the shameless one.”

“Well, It’s hardly _my_ fault. How was I supposed to know about all _this_?”

“All what?”

Nygma twirls the cane end-over end in his fingers, then points it at the web of scars sprawling over Crane’s upper back. The quizzical curl of its brass question-mark head hovers bare centimeters over the skin, close enough to radiate metallic coolness, a gentle reminder that neither tact nor respect for boundaries has been or ever will be the forte of the Riddler.

“All _that_ ,” he declares.

“What? … Oh.” Crane jerks slightly at the cane topper’s presence – or at something else – as he peeks over his shoulder. “How in the world did you see _that_?”

“I’ve keener senses than you probably realize, doctor – plus the fruits of some formal forensics training.”

“ _You_ were an analyst?”

“For a time. The actual analysis was often trivial, brainless work, which was probably why I left the field for the higher calling I now pursue – but that’s beside the point.”

Crane sniffs, shuffling a few loose sheafs of paper before him indifferently. “Truth be told, I’m more surprised there was a time people could tolerate you.”

“You’re deflecting, doctor. And as much as I enjoy our verbal spars, I’m much more interested in _this_ at the moment.” The question mark prods into Crane’s shoulder blade insistently.

Scarecrow rises. To the uninitiated, his lanky frame might at first glance appear like a cheap caricature of the dummy from which he takes his name, but he’s more than a match for the Riddler in physical threat – even here, in some barely-livable basement in the Bowery without his needles or toxins.

“Perhaps I don’t want to, Nygma,” he says in an acidic whisper. “Did that ever occur to you?”

“Touchy subject, hm?”

“Old wounds. Ancient history. If I were you, I’d leave it be.”

“Now, you know I can’t do that.” Eddie spreads his hands plaintively, quirks his eyebrows, and smiles wryly. “’Medically speaking’, I mean. It’s a _compulsion_ – or so those Arkham quacks say.”

“Then you’re bound to be disappointed.”

“Am I? Those scars aren’t from anything the Batman might use – moreover, they’re not even _recent_. Almost invisible, unless your faculties are attuned to detect such things. Unless you fell into the sewers, fought off one of Ratcatcher swarms, and healed inhumanly quickly – which is unlikely, but not impossible, especially in Gotham - the _logical_ deduction is that those ghastly wounds occurred at a very early stage in your development… sometime in childhood, I’d wager.”

Crane’s lower eyelids hitch upwards, just slightly. His jaw works slowly beneath his mask. His breath is slow and guarded – this is a body that is trying not to betray its emotions. Nygma has seen this kind of poise before; it’s astonishing, the kind of bravado some of Gotham’s intellectually inferiors will put on when you slap them in a riddle-themed deathtrap.

“In the ballpark, am I?”

“You’d be better off forgetting what you saw, Nygma.”

Edward chuckles. “Jonathan, please! You know I don’t mean to pry,” he chides – before prying, “All I’m asking is how you got those scars.”

Crane shoots him a nasty smile; the mouth stitched into the burlap sympathetically screws itself into an equally-nasty approximation of a rictus grin. “Running through cornfields,” he says, and there’s acid in his voice. “Now drop the subject.”

“Honestly, Jon, you’re wound tighter than one of Fugate’s clocks. Every arch-criminal in has ‘scar stories’ – if you’re lucky, some of them are even consistent – but out of all of them I think you’re the only one who doesn’t want to talk about yours.” He waggles his eyebrows. “Do you want me to go first? I know it must be hard for you – showing vulnerability, and all that. “

Scarecrow growls. He lowers himself back to the floor, glowering upwards; the light strikes his eyes, lends them a frosty glint, even as his canvas face is framed in shadow. “You know _nothing_ about me, Nygma.”

“Alright, fine. Be that way.” The Riddler gives a shrug that’s somewhere between graceful acquiescence and smug certainty. “But riddle me this, dear doctor: what gets harder to hide the harder you try?” (He doesn’t wait for a response; he already knows Crane isn’t game, and it’s more of a rhetorical riddle than anything. “Answer: the truth. And I _will_ have it out, one way or another!”

“I’d like to see you try. That trail is long cold, Nygma. If you go looking for answers you’ll find nothing but dust. As it should be,” he adds, in a low tone the Riddler suspects he wasn’t meant to pick up on.

The Riddler’s mind is already swirling with possibilities as Scarecrow hunches back over his formulas. His brain races over each of them like fingers roving over a Rubik’s cube, guided for now by analytical whimsy, to be followed up on later through thorough investigation. The theories being drawn up in his head are carefully sorted upon the basis of likelihood, based upon what he knows about the man; only the most plausible of hypotheses, past a certain margin, are retained - the rest, discarded. Nygma crooks a finger under his chin as the gears and cogs of his incandescently brilliant brain begin to grind and churn. As an afterthought, his feet carry him back to the creaky, splintered staircase leading upstairs.

“You must admit it makes a fascinating riddle,” he remarks, halfway up the first half of the stairs. “’What can scar a scarecrow?’”

“I’m sure you’re just the man to figure it out, Edward,” Crane replies – languid, disinterested. Dismissive.

Edward Nygma vowed then and there that he’d be making Jonathan Crane eat crow within the month.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A little experiment to explore the relationship between Riddler and Scarecrow, and get a handle on writing for both of them.
> 
> Scarecrow's outfit is, of course, based on what he wore in Arkham Asylum - which is my personal favorite look for him, but that's neither here nor there
> 
> Comments and kudos are always appreciated!


	2. two legs at noon

“’What has branches and leaves, but no bark?’’

“A library, of course,” replies the man in the cardigan smelling faintly of bookbinder’s glue. “How apropos.”

“Good to see you, Kingor,” Nygma says, half-lying. He doffs his bowler (a plain gray with a black band, to match his boring suit – one of his ‘incognito’ looks, for when neon green spandex covered in black question marks was too much for the general public) and drops it atop the tapering tower of hardcovers resting on the reading desk, lending the stack an abstract snowman-like mien.

I.N. Kingor’s bibliophilic tendencies had served him well as an information broker, the self-styled Bookworm; his specialization in public records, rare texts, and hardcopy data organization had made him a minor significant figure in Gotham’s criminal underworld. Occasionally Kingor would branch out into schemes of his own, usually revolving around his own niche obsessions – but never quite succeeding. Never making it into the big leagues.

Full disclosure; Nygma was fine with that. Bookworm just wasn’t made of arch-criminal material – and certainly wasn’t fit to share the stage with the dazzling genius of the Riddler.

Besides… Kingor was just _insufferable_. Kingor, with his smug half-smile and reedy librarian voice… Kingor, who not only takes his sweet time switching off his hat-bound booklight and twisting it to one side, but makes you feel every second of it… Kingor the binoclard, whose thick black frames sit across his face like an unsightly freeway (not at all like Edward’s own, which were trendy and stylish and meshed perfectly with the genius’s geometry of his head)… and worst of all, Kingor’s ridiculous obsession with proving his own mental capacity by basing his criminal career on niche intellectual pursuits!

True, the Bookworm’s presence was utterly detestable – but in this case the Riddler had need of his unique skillset.

“I must admit, I find it perplexing that the so-called keenest criminal mind in Gotham is asking for my services,” Kingor pontificates. “And on researching a fellow rogue, no less. One cannot help but wonder why?”

“To prove a point,” Nygma responds flatly. “Your findings, please.”

Kingor makes a face as he pushes a folder sitting at his elbow to the center of the table. The act of flipping it open disturbs the placement of the materials within; a few pages glide a short distance out onto the tabletop, each of them varying in age and condition, all bound in protective sheaths of thin plastic. Bookworm spread them out over the hardwood surface with one hand as he primed his hat-bound booklight with the other.

“Certainly one of the more difficult commissions I’ve taken on,” Kingor mutters absently. “But my fine, twisty worms proved they were up to the task once again.”

“Yes, you certainly seem to have kept yourself busy.” Edward leans over the table, pushing his glasses back up the bridge of his nose, voice hushed. “Academic transcripts, census records, newspaper callouts – hm, I remember reading this one here, back when our Scarecrow made his first appearance – and what’s this here? Birth certificate?”

“Only a facsimile,” Kingor replies flippantly. “The original was lost along with most of the carbon copies in a fire at the local records office – this specimen was lucky to survive the years. Note the brittleness of the sheet, here – the crackling along the surface suggests it wasn’t properly cared for, probably shoved in a filing cabinet somewhere to be forgotten - ”

“Hang on,” the Riddler interjects. “’Birthplace: Arlen, _Georgia’_?!”

“Indeed! I was surprised as well. Evidently Professor Crane went to great lengths to jettison the accent native to that region – as well as the other trappings of his past.” Kingor digs another scrap of paperwork out of the folder – and ‘scrap’ is indeed the word for it, being one ragged edge of a page that had been mostly burned away. “Look there, along the burnt edge,” he says, plucking a magnifying glass from the inner pocket of his cardigan. “The color and intensity of the damage suggest an accelerant was involved.”

“That records office you mentioned wouldn’t happen to have been involved in an arson incident, would it?”

“ _Suspected_ arson. But of course, Arlen County authorities never named any suspects.”

Nygma nodded. He’d had a hunch, after a cursory combing-through of the openly available information on his quarry that yielded suspiciously little results beyond common public knowledge, that the trail of his quarry had been deliberately obfuscated; that hunch, it seemed, was beginning to bear out. The question of _how_ this had been accomplished was much less fascinating to him than the question of _why;_ the available evidence certainly suggested that a considerable amount of effort had been expended to erase the early history of one Jonathan Crane – but nothing yet uncovered spoke to a possible motive for doing so.

“I have to admit I’m disappointed, Kingor. For the amount I’m paying you I expected something more.”

“The Bard tells us, ‘Expectation is the root of all heartache’.”

Nygma’s brow furrows; the wheels and gears of his mind are racing, but without traction; they slip fruitlessly, yet obsessively against each other. The puzzle is still missing a piece – but where?

“Incidentally, I did discover a certain plot of land owned by a rather well-to-do family in the vicinity of Arlen County,” Bookworm adds nonchalantly. “Before the Depression struck and reduced them to pennies, the Keenys were apparently the toast of the town.” He extricates a folded-up map from his cardigan pocket, laying it out on the table; a large green circle drawn in felt-tip encloses the area on the grid to which he refers. “The last of the family either carried on trying to tend the ancestral homestead or drifted away to greener pastures a few decades ago. No one’s seen hide nor hair of them since, in either case.”

Riddler stares at the green circle. The sight of it induces a prickling sensation in his cerebral cortex – the kind of prickle that accompanies the sight of a crossword puzzle almost filled in, or a lock almost cracked. He glances back at the birth certificate.

‘Born to Gerald Crane and’… Karen _Keeny_.

Well, well, well.

* * *

If the bumpkins of Arlen County, Georgia had any thoughts about the immaculate classic coupe with the question-mark hood ornament cruising in a southwesterly direction down the parkway, they saved them for when the jade-coated automobile had long since passed out of earshot. Doubtless, they would have had even more colorful comments on its driver.

The motor of the ‘Riddlemobile’ whines plaintively as it crests the final gritty hill on the drive to the spot Bookworm’s map labels Keeny Manor. Kingor had obviously relished his moment of investigative superiority over the Riddler, but his information had been unerringly accurate – which was why Nygma was content to merely blackmail the man into silence with a Dewey Decimal System-compliant list of his ‘fine, twisty worms’ in Gotham state rather than leaking the informants’ identities to the FBI.

One could charitably describe the Keeny estate as ‘a bit of a fixer-upper’, had they arrived upon it maybe five or ten years ago. Today, however, it was more ruinous than ever; sections of the manor house had disintegrated, caved in by weather or lost to rot and termites. The auxiliary building – a chapel or arboretum of some sort, possibly both - squatting a short distance beside it had fared little better, having shed almost all its edifice down to the rusted metal beams, now resembling a huge birdcage sunk into the ground. Ivies and weeds ramble overgrown over most of the architecture; sunbleached grasses tower over the hood of the car, and surrounding trees loom over these as well. A lane of worn dirt delivers the Riddler, at last, to his destination.

The engine hisses and spits indignantly in the low amber sunlight as Edward pops open the door and steps out. He steadies himself against the convertible roof and squints up at the face of the manor through his glasses; it glowers down at him in turn through cracked, foggy windowpanes. Appropriately enough, he hears the caw of a crow in the distance as he ventures up the front steps and through the front door.

The damage is almost even worse inside, if such a feat is even possible. A thick layer of dust covers everything, even though the whole structure seems about to cave in on itself at any given moment – even the walls, peeling and cracked, seem frozen in the act of finally buckling. The expected creaking of the floorboards resonates outward with every step, running far into the bones of the house, every step threatening to be the straw that breaks the camel’s back. Shadows reach deep into the bowels of the foyer, positing a voyage into the literal heart of the darkness for the answer. Heedlessly, Edward clicks on his flashlight and presses on into the manor.

Every so often, there’s a flutter, or a clatter, somewhere deeper in the building. It doesn’t scare the Riddler (he’s far too intelligent for such easy frights, and deduces the cause to be a wild animal or the wind rattling loose objects). It does, however, amuse him.

A haunted mansion, Jon? Really?

He wanders through dark hallways and rooms of antediluvian clutter for longer than he cares to admit, and by the time he reaches the largest of the bedrooms the novelty of a Southern Gothic house of horrors has worn off. Fortunate, then, that he finds the clue he’s looking for sitting by the splintered mirror of an antebellum-period woman’s vanity – a diary so weathered and faded as to appear sandblasted. He grips the shaft of the flashlight in his teeth and turns the pages as daintily as he dares.

Only fragments remain of the history therein, but it’s just enough for the Riddler to piece it all together. It starts with a puritanical great-grandmother, and a child neither planned, nor wanted, nor loved. There’s a recipe for corporal punishment involving hunting pheromones, vermin, and a Sunday suit in the middle, the product of which was left to simmer for years before inevitably boiling over. The ending lies somewhere beyond the ominous words “should never have tried to raise Jonathan alone”.

A crow shrieks in the distance. The trees outside rustle fitfully.

Edward crosses to the window looking out on the field, purloined diary tucked under one elbow. A scarecrow stands at the crest of a pathetically low mound, the ground around it flat and scrubby where the surrounding vegetation withered and died. Nygma ponders the sight, as well as the gravity of what he’s uncovered, as the sun continues to creep down from the sky.

The chapel awaits.

* * *

The atmosphere of the Keeny estate was different enough already to raise gooseflesh, but around the chapel it’s especially prominent – there’s an energy, almost, a current in the air. An aura, if you believe in such things. The stench of past misery.

Prior evidence notwithstanding, it doesn’t take the Riddler to deduce that something awful happened here.

The interior is nearly empty, aside from the support beams struggling valiantly to keep the structure from caving in. There’s a gash in the beams that floods moonlight onto a particular spot on the bare dirt floor. A bony something protrudes from the ground in the middle of the lunar limelight, pitted and scored as if by the talons of the corvid genus.

Nygma is by now familiar with the geometry of these pits and scores; they left very similar damage patterns to human flesh, as his earlier research had indicated. But flesh, at least, could heal – if imperfectly. People were less lucky.

He pokes the object carefully out of its rut in the ground with his cane. It is, as he was anticipating, a human skull.

He takes it in one hand, perching its upper jaw on his palm and supporting the occipital lobe with his fingertips. “Great-Granny Keeny, I presume.”

Great-Granny’s skull can do little else by now but retain its shape, but Nygma is already reconstructing the face it used to hold in his mind. He can already picture the eyes – flinty, unyielding, gleefully beholding the anguish their owner causes. He’s seen similar eyes in the face of his own father.

A whim takes hold of him, and with uncanny fury he hurls the skull into a dark corner of the chapel. It lands with a _thunk_ – and immediately the air around him is filled with avian screaming and black bodies, wings beating in a maelstrom so sudden and forceful Edward has to hurl himself to the ground with a yelp and cover his head. The murder twists spasmodically in the air, shrieking in horrendous chorus, before finally rising through the rip in the birdcage ceiling and scattering like a flock of bats before the ghost face of the moon. The sound of their cries echo for almost half a minute afterward; it takes longer than that for the sound to leave Edward’s ears.

When he is finally alone, he rises on shaky legs - gasping, swallowing air. Kicking himself for being so easily spooked. Crane would have been _delighted_.

Regardless! He has what he needs. The Riddler's intellectual dominance is again vindicated. All that remains is to commemorate the occasion.

To that end, Nygma reaches carefully into the fold of his shoulder bag and retrieves a question-mark trophy, grateful to see that the bent neon tubing was undamaged by his earlier pratfall. He flicks the switch on its base, briefly bathing his face in soft green light, and sets it in the furrow formerly occupied by Great-Granny’s brainpan. He regards the symbol of his deductive brilliance fondly – rubbing away the gooseflesh on the back of his neck – before turning and making way for the Riddlemobile.

It’s not _fear_ that makes him pick up his pace, truly. He’s just had enough of Georgia. That’s all.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I debated which version of Scarecrow's past to use, but ultimately went with the fandom-favorite backstory from Scarecrow Year One, which to be fair is excellent - but hot take, Cycle of Violence is better than people give it credit for.
> 
> The Riddler Trophy is, of course, lifted from the Arkham series. And Bookworm comes to us from the Batman '66 series, where he's mostly labored in obscurity aside from one or two cameo appearances.
> 
> Comments and kudoses are greatly appreciated.


	3. three legs at night

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> very sorry for the delay, it took me a hot minute to find my batman muse again
> 
> (also this chapter is kind of intense, fair warning)

Fading daylight throws falls across Gotham’s industrial quarter; its long fingers reach through the windows of the dilapidated factory the Scarecrow calls home and scrabble against the edges of the raised concrete slab he uses as a partners’ desk. Beakers and test tubes clutter one corner of the makeshift table, alembics and crucibles occupy the other, and paperclipped and sticky-noted research notes scatter across the middle. The mess is arranged in a semicircle, affording the arch-criminal efficient and total control over his domain. Flaky straw buries the edge and foot of the slab like dandruff. His lanky arms and spindly fingers move tirelessly, searching for Gotham’s latest nightmare.

A manila folder, emblazoned with a question mark painted in obnoxious luminescent green paint, lands in the center of Scarecrow’s organized chaos with a heavy thump. It makes him freeze – cock his head – and finally lever the cover open with the gas-tipped claw of a gauntleted finger.

There’s a yellowed photograph sitting on top of the stack of files inside. The face within it is Jonathan Crane’s.

Scarecrow lifts his gaze from the file. The movement is long, unnatural – almost reptilian in its slowness. On the other side of the slab stands the Riddler, examining his gloved fingernails with ineffable smugness. The flame-fired furnace opposite his position casts his emerald profile in glimmering orange – and in deep, dark shadow where the Scarecrow eclipses its light.

“What is this?” hisses the canvas-cased criminal.

“Your riddle,” Nygma replies offhandedly. “I found the answer. Feel free to congratulate me anytime.”

Clawed fingertips push the rest of the documents aside for dull, dark eyes to scan. What they see, the Scarecrow finds unusually chilling; satellite imagery of the Keeny estate… vital records… news clippings… ancient diary pages, faded ink written in Great-Granny’s hand…

“How did you find all this?”

“It’s easy if you know where to look. Of course, a little gray matter helps too, of which I naturally possess a generous supply. Really, I should be thanking you for the exercise – a mind rebels at stagnation, you know.”

Emotion crawls invisibly over the Scarecrow’s back. He rubs the back of his neck, where scars lurk under straw and burlap. “You did… all this… over that stupid conversation in your basement?”

“Well, really, Crane, what do you expect? I’d hardly be the prince of puzzles if I left such a one unsolved.”

Ah. Of course. It had all been a game. Even when it came to other peoples’ lives – lives full of pain and misery, lives that had been discarded when they were no longer worth living – leave it to Edward Nygma to root through the dustbin of history for the sake of one of his games.

“I’ll admit you gave me no small amount of trouble – you covered your tracks impeccably, for a man with your history. It took me quite a while to find any official trace of you at all, besides what turns up in the news – but, naturally, my superior deductive instincts eventually carried the day.”

Of course. Of course it was all about him, in the end. How smart he was for pawing through the corpse of someone else’s past; how clever he was for pulling all the ugly, writhing maggots out and shoving them into the light. How much more brilliant he was than everyone who doubted him and tore him down and shoved his nose in it before he put on the Riddler costume, and by extension everyone around him now that he had.

“But of course, you had to know your secrets wouldn’t stay buried forever, once my genius-level intellect came to bear on the problem – but why ever did you try to erase yourself from the record books, my dear doctor? Now that’s a brain teaser all on its own…”

He couldn’t see? With a brain like his, he couldn’t deduce why? What was he thinking – of course he couldn’t. He was like him, once, but he’d grown wiser since then. Edward Nygma and The Riddler were one and the same – one couldn’t exist without the other. Nygma hadn’t had the same awakening he had. He didn’t feel the same urge to transform – to completely obliterate the weakness and pain of the past, to give birth to the nightmares of Gotham’s future.

And still the ignorant twerp wants to keep digging.

“You know, Crane, it’s almost funny… at this point I almost know you better than you know yourself!”

How dare he. How _dare_ he.

This could not stand.

Scarecrow finally blinks. There’s an empty syringe sitting by his right pinky, where his hand rests on the corner of the file. The Riddler has his back to him, now, sitting on the edge of the slab before him, gesturing with his cane as he pontificates to an imaginary audience.

“Have you shared your findings with anyone else, Edward?” he asks calmly.

“Hm? Oh, no, of course not. Why would I? Consider that old saw, ‘what time is it when an elephant sits on your—' hhhhghk--!”

His babbling dies in a yelp when the Lord of Fear grabs him by the collar and pulls him roughly down onto the slab. Nygma reacts with terror, thrashing wildly as Scarecrow pins him down with an arm, deceptively strong for his slight frame. The other hand holds the syringe; Nygma grabs it by the wrist, just barely keeping it at bay. The cane is thrown away in a panic, its novelty question-mark head snapping off its tip.

“Crane! Crane, what are you—”

“You should have known better than to go rifling through other people’s pasts, Nygma.” The Scarecrow’s voice is a low, dangerous growl. “You should have known that some things are buried for a _reason_.”

A frantic kick sends alembics spilling over the side, crashing against the floor; the air fills with a foul chemical stench. “B-but you told me I could do it-!”

“Did I? I recall the matter differently. Wasn’t it _you_ who insisted on uncovering my secrets? Even when I _suggested_ you ought to reconsider?”

Nygma grunts. The needle’s point falls centimeters closer to its target. “F-for God’s sake, Crane, let me go! This isn’t funny!”

“I do – regret that we’ve arrived at this point, Edward, but you chose these consequences by your own hand… and two people with the knowledge of that poor, weak Jonathan Crane is one too many.”

“Crane…! Be – be reasonable!”

“A-actually, I am.” Scarecrow wrenches his arm out of Nygma’s grip and stabs down once more; the Riddler barely manages to catch the wrist again, this time against his forearm. The demented professor’s breath is hot against Nygma’s face. “Were I an _emotional_ man, this syringe would be full of my foulest batch of toxin… but I think death by embolism is much more courteous, don’t you? It’s quite efficient, you know, and I’m sure you are a busy man.”

Nygma’s eyes open wide. The reflection of the needle’s thin silhouette is framed perfectly upon his aqueous membrane. It’s a moment Scarecrow wishes could last forever.

“Crane, please!”

“It’s not such a bad way to go, really.” A stitched mouth smiles thinly beneath gleaming, sadistic eyes. “Don’t be afraid.”

* * *

Even with the syringe bearing silent death hovers mere inches away from his neck, The Riddler can’t help but appreciate the near-certainty of this particular conundrum.

It’s like a puzzle, you see – most things are, but life-and-death situations most especially. Even when the walls are closing in and time seems at its end, there’s almost always a solution – the one move you can make that guarantees salvation.

It’s just… taking him a moment to figure out what that move might be right now. That’s all.

Scarecrow’s elbow digging in hard on his lungs brings him forcefully back to the present. Every belt and flywheel in the sublime mechanism of his mind is working at overdrive to produce the answer to the puzzle of his impending death, but in spite of everything the point of the needle is falling closer and closer, and still he remains empty-handed.

After a life of nigh-superhuman mental acuity, what a time to finally draw a blank!

Crane looms ever closer. His skin is lying to him, pretending to feel the sting of the pin when it actually still has yet to reach his pores – _a phantom prick_ , his brain quips, and for whatever reason the thought makes a bemused exhalation push through his lips. The real thing will be coming soon enough, he knows, unless he can come up with something fast.

Then, suddenly – as if freshly sprung from the ground – his mind finally hatches a desperate gamble. It isn’t his best work – certainly, it’s nowhere near the level of complexity that his standard of intellectual maneuvering would prefer – but it’s at least the start of a lifeline, and, well, needs must.

“As I was _saying_ ,” he hisses, “before I was so _rudely_ – interrupted – ‘what time is it when an elephant s-sits on your fence?’”

“Is now really the time to indulge your neuroses, Nygma?”

“C-come on, Jonny-boy. This one’s easy – a real softball. Or have I been overestimating your mental acuity after all?”

“I’ve nothing to prove to you, Edward.”

“Consider it my – last request – " The pressure on his lungs is growing bothersome; he’s wheezing every other breath now.

Crane chuckles darkly. Riddler can see his tongue running across his teeth through the mask’s broken stitches. “’Last request’, hm… It’s at least on-brand, I’ll give you that.”

“Well? – Don’t keep me waiting…!”

“Well, it’s hardly your best work, but… I suppose I can indulge.” Scarecrow’s lanky frame finally relents, if only slightly. “’Time to get a new fence’. Naturally. _Everyone_ knows that one. Goodbye, Edward.”

The Riddler senses his window of opportunity closing. He shouts, “Exactly!”, just as Crane readies the needle for its final plunge –

And the Scarecrow freezes. And blinks. “I don’t follow.”

“Question: What’s a riddle everyone knows the answer to?”

The corners of Crane’s dark eyes draw close; he shakes his head just slightly. “What does that have to do with…?”

“Answer: Worthless!” Nygma finally marshals the strength to shove the erstwhile professor off him, leaping to his feet and rounding on his heel. “What good is any scrap of information if it’s already a matter of public record?”, he demands, fumbling with his bowler gone askew on his head. “What possible reason would I have for airing your dirty laundry, Crane?”

Scarecrow regards him sulkily. His clawed thumb runs longingly over the plunger of his would-be murder weapon. “’If you know me, you’ll want to share me,” he mutters. “You told on yourself a long time ago, Nygma.”

“’But if you share me, I’ll be gone’. There’s no value for me in broadcasting all your sordid little secrets, despite what you may think!”

Crane cocks his head again. The tail of his (frankly ridiculous) hat drifts to one side. “Assuming that’s true, we remain at an impasse. I have no guarantee you won’t continue this… vanity project as you say.”

“And I have no guarantee you won’t gas me with your toxin anyway – or _worse_. But here we are.”

Scarecrow hums thoughtfully. High, high above them, rainfall begins to patter against the roof. “Then how do you propose we resolve this situation?”

“What I propose,” Nygma says, drawing up his chest, “is détente.”

“…Détente.”

“’The easing of hostility or strained relations, especially between countries’ - though in this case between arch-criminals. My terms are these: I will leave you in possession of everything I have discovered over the last few weeks, and in return, you allow me to depart unmolested.”

“I notice nothing in this agreement prevents me from killing you later,” Crane muses.

“I had presumed that went without saying,” Nygma glowers. “But clearly you’re determined to fall behind my expectations.”

“No, Edward, I’m mocking you. After today I’d thought you’d be able to detect that much, at least.”

The Riddler’s cheeks burn. Scarecrow finds the sight immensely gratifying. “No leaks,” he grunts, counting off on his fingers, “no reprisals, and no further investigation of your ‘dark and troubled’ past. Do we have an accord or not?”

The eyeslits narrow on the Scarecrow’s gaunt canvas face; barely perceptible pupils rove over the Riddler’s figure, looking for any tell or sign of deception. Finally, at length, he says “I suppose I can consider this acceptable.”

“Good,” Nygma says curtly. “Now I’m going to go _home_ , to my _lair_ , and begin working on my next _scheme_ , and if you’ve got any sense at all in that sack of hay you call a head you’ll keep out of my way for the foreseeable future. Understood?”

“If I should ever find myself possessed of the need to be in your presence, Nygma, it will be far too soon.”

With that, Crane returns his attention to the mess of crinkled papers on his slab. He intendsfor that parting shot to be the end of the discussion, but of course Nygma feels the need to get the last word.

“I had a moment, you know, where I actually had some amount of _sympathy_ for you. But I suppose there’s no room for that sort camaraderie in our line of work, now is there?”

Scarecrow rolls his eyes as the door to the warehouse grinds open and slams shut. He needed Nygma’s pity like he needed another night in the Keeny aviary.

Fastidiously, he collects all the scattered evidence of his past and returns it to the folder it had arrived in. With the documents neatly organized, he finally notices the lazy scrawl on the inside cover, emerald green etched into buff pulp paper.

_When is a villain not THE villain?_

Scarecrow ponders the question for only a moment. Then he turns, opens the furnace, and throws the whole collection into the fire.


End file.
